Is Kerr OK? That looked like a calf pull?

In a way, if Kerr knew he had an injury coming, he probably thought he still needed to compete. pride, hope etc. also because jakob showed up despite his fitness, so there was no way Kerr was going to run away while jakob faced the world.

BBC had more finish line footage of Kerr this morning. He was grabbing at his calf while stumbling around. Could be a strain or cramp. Wightman said that they sit on a bus for 20 minutes between the warm up track and the stadium, that is far from ideal though worse for sprinters

Funny to watch the London DL back and see just after 2:20 video time/~34s race time - who does Josh Kerr put his arm out into twice to take his position on the rail? Isaac Nader! (Who would go on in that race to kick past Wightman for third in a foreshadowing of yesterday’s final.)

"It's my title, it will be a real battle for whoever wants to come and take it off of me." A real battle it was, but not with Josh!

That's an idiotic arrangement that could only have been concocted by people with no T&F experience. If that's true, the Japanese organizers have some explaining to do.

Tbh the only view I have is that it's a shame he couldn't compete yesterday. It's very noticeable how lean Kerr has become this year + Paris last year versus years prior, and that usually correlates with fast times. The whole championship has been a shame in that regard, I think after the utter chaos of the Paris final we track fans really wanted a round 2 among Kerr, Hocker, Jakob with the added threat of Laros, Wightman, Reynold etc. The race was still exciting, but for me there was less of a must-watch factor attached to it without some of the biggest names being present.

based schizo

Hopefully an injury he can fully recover from relatively quickly

I can see why he carried on for a while after the injury struck -- maybe if a cramp it would go away -- but don't get why he ran the entire race

You'd think that would show up in the sprints then. But those times have been extremely fast for both Men and Women across all sprint distances: 9.77, 10.61, 19.51 (SF), 22.07 (SF), 43.53, 47.78.

He has form for this kind of thing- in 2022 he was way below his usual form pretty much all year but he kept showing up for big races even when he knew he would get hammered. This year he tried to run Millrose even after puking all night as he felt he owed it to the fans who were showing up to see him. I think there's a 'stiff upper lip' element to his behaviour where showing up for the fans and failing is better than sitting it out (or stepping off the track in this case). In this way I think he's more similar to Jakob than they would both care to admit.

Isn't that illegal?

Definitely. To be honest I didn’t clock how slow they were running at first. I figured it was related to the the tie up/fall at the end of the semi.

That was something that struck me about Wightman during the race; in a sport filled with lean muscled athletes with very little body fat, when Jake took off with 300m to go, he looked leaner and faster than I remember him in '22. Not surprised he had the strength and speed to go for the win in that race.

Kerr's injury looked like a foot injury initially to me, like when you get that "pop" on your foot out of nowhere and you realize "something's wrong" but almost can't quite believe it. I don't dislike Kerr, and I very much like that he and Jakob keep their war of the words up; it kept our sport in the headlines and made it entertaining. We could use more of that.

I called it 1st in the thread.

Please clap.

At 2:39 video time/44s race time as they hit 300m, Kerr reaches out to give Koech a full shove - almost a punch - in the back. Koech turns around at ~400m to tell Kerr off. In Koech’s postrace interview he told Gault about how Kerr was repeatedly stepping on him early on. Pretty clear at this point that Kerr has an anger problem on the track.

There are a ton of really good videos on YouTube that follows his strength training. He is an absolute animal in the gym-low rep heavy weights and a bunch of plyos. You can def see it is paying off, he is so explosive and elastic.

What's amazing is that he still beat the other four of the top five from Paris by at least a full round!

From Gault: "Update on Josh Kerr: his coach Danny Mackey said they haven't done a scan yet to determine the extent of the injury, but he injured his right calf during the contact with Tim Cheruiyot just after crossing the line of the semifinal. In the final, it just gave out."

Like I said before, this was always Occam's Razor and yet the conspiracy theorists on here were still claiming that he was faking it or that the real reason he wasn't a factor was his fitness/mental fortitude. Sometimes an injury is just an injury guys.

I mean, this isn't exactly a natural position to end a semi on:

He deserved it.